Stonewall Triptych

On May 8, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to affirm his support of marriage equality. After that time, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend the DOMA before the Supreme Court, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the central parts of DOMA, removing the federal government from defining marriages, and now 32 states have marriage equality. It is not certain that Obama caused this series of events, but it is undeniable that he facilitated them—he and his Attorney General Eric Holder.

At a time when the appeals courts are still working on the effects of the Supreme Court’s having declined, on October 6, 2014, to hear appeals from the 4th, 7th, and 10th Circuit Courts, it begins to seem as if the marriage fight has been won and that the next fight is less over the question, “Shall same-sex couples be allowed to marry?” than over the larger question, “Is there any right of citizenship that can be constitutionally denied to gay people?” 

We are six days from the mid-term elections of President Obama’s second term, and it is appropriate to look at how we got here. Getting here was the work of thousands upon thousands of gay people, working alone and with others, by the various civil rights organizations, the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, The Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activist Alliance, the Human Rights Campaign, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and Lavender Menace, to name just the early ones. The movement to obtain legal marriage started out being a bizarre attempt by people who didn’t seem to need (or want) marriage, but in the twenty years since 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court almost gave us legal marriage, legal marriage went from the fringe to the very center of our movement for liberty. It turns out that legal marriage brings with it a legal status indistinguishable from freedom. 

The single person most prominent in recent years in the movement for legal marriage has been the President of the United States, Barack Obama. And now, any listing of the achievements of his administration would have to include, prominently, his leadership in bringing marriage to all citizens without regard to gender. It’s not just that the courts have come around to a new reading of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, including more people in their expansive reading of the Constitution, it is also that the president has been a leader in bringing the whole of the United States with him in his acceptance of it. In his second inaugural address, he said, “We the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Senaca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall….” And Stonewall. And at great moments since then, he has made it a point to bring into the legendary history of this republic, men and women who love their own gender. In Soweto, at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, he said, “Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs; and are still persecuted for what they look like, or how they worship, or who they love.” So he included us when there was no political benefit to doing so, teaching the citizens of the world where our place is. I am profoundly grateful to Obama. Eventually, we might have ended up here, without him, but it has happened more quickly with him. He was the true leader, bringing his people—the people of the United States—along with him.

President Obama’s financial policies are successful. He has created healthcare reform. He is working on serious environment action, and he opened up American society and government to minorities, and women. He is transforming the federal judiciary.

In the election next Tuesday, he and his party deserve our support. Vote. Vote for Democrats.

The recent synod of the church is receiving mixed reviews. Barbie Latza Nadeau, writing in The Daily Beast, says the synod is a victory for Pope Francis, and that all is going to come out well after a year’s discussions and in the conclusion of the synod. Or it may be that young people are going to settle all of this.  Carol Kuruvilla, in the Huffington Post, says that, “Close to 85% of self-identified Catholics between the ages of 18 and 29 believe gays and lesbians should be accepted by society, according to a 2014 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.” The same survey says that the same age group, 18-29, is in favor of gay marriage by 75%. These numbers may make the painful struggles in the synod irrelevant.

Another factor that may contribute to its irrelevancy is that many people have simply turned away. Paul Raushenbush, writing in the Huffington Post, observes the internecine squabbles of the church and responds, as a gay man, “The idea that some random people are debating my life and my love now seems strange and insulting.” He is, as he says, “over it.” There are many gay men and women who are simply over the struggles of the church. I think my own response to reading about the synod is, “Let them have whatever painful churning discussions they wish. None of it has anything to do with me or with my husband.” I don’t think members of those organizations understand how many hundreds of thousands of gay men and women were driven away by the spectacle of Christians arguing in public over the question of whether gay men and women deserve the love of the church. Those organizations who fought over this question during the last twenty or thirty years, are smaller and less vibrant because of their own careless indifference to their own principles.

We’re gone now. Even if Pope Francis’s Synod on the Family by chance discovers the Christian way to respond to gay families, it will find that it is promulgating its new discoveries to pews emptied of gay people. For myself, I can’t imagine ever going back.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and I would join in the fun but I’m out and everybody I know (who’s in that situation) is out, and the coming out is now for other people. Cheers for them, it’s a big moment.

But a comment. Every time coming out comes up—and it comes up all the time because there are so many gay folk, and most of us understand that a person doesn’t just come out once, he or she comes out again and again and again as their lives progress—then we have to talk about coming out again and demonstrate that our culture hasn’t really gotten a good grip on what it is, or why it is what it is, and what it means. What we do is simplify a complicated situation. We act as if it’s a public event when really it’s deeply private, the most important parts of which are shielded from the public eye. 

Coming Out Day is an annual event celebrated since 1988 "to promote a safe world for LGBT individuals to live truthfully and openly.”  This quotation, from Bill in Portland, on Daily Kos Friday, a Democratic, leftist blog I read all the time and have linked to occasionally, gets at the heart of our societal confusion about coming out. The essential problem with what Bill in Portland has said is that he assumes that in some way the person who has not come out yet is not living truthfully. The way this is usually put is that the person who has not come out is not being honest with himself. That is absolutely not true. In almost every case, the person who has not come out knows that he or she is gay. That person is not coming out for any of several reasons, the most frequent being that the world is unsafe and the person is protecting himself. And that’s OK.

Coming out has several parts. There is my consciousness of myself (“I am a fifteen year old boy”), my consciousness of my sexual desires (“I think I want the boy in the locker room who is two years older than I am”), my awareness of my culture (“Will they beat me up?”), my ignorance of what these desires mean to me (“Am I a bad person?”). I do not need to be told, in the midst of all this, that gay people think I am being dishonest. I know exactly who I am and what my desires are. 

What the gay community is really doing when it starts laying this on the fifteen-year-old kid, is this: The community wants the fifteen-year-old to be open to the community. For its own political reasons, it wants the fifteen-year-old to be public so as to increase the power of the community. 

Now, to be clear. No kid owes me anything. Let me say that again. No kid owes me anything. If the gay person who has not come out finds his situation tolerable, then he should not be hounded by us with charges of dishonesty.  A person’s sexuality is that person’s alone. He does not owe information about that sexuality to any other soul on this planet. This is what freedom means.